Mr. Obama’s war

From today’s editorial: This is a presidency that will be assessed by what it learned from the near-disaster of Dec. 25.

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It will be some time before the Obama administration lives down the since-retracted assertion by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano that the failure of a suspected terrorist to blow up a passenger jet was proof that the system works. Two weeks of embarrassing and unsettling revelations make that clear enough. What the near-calamity of Dec. 25 might be proof of, though, is how President Obama has changed.

Say this for the stern-faced, candid and chagrined President who spoke publicly twice last week about the failures in the nation’s intelligence network that have been exposed since the arrest of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He shows every sign of having learned an invaluable lesson.

“This was a screw-up that could have been disastrous.” Mr. Obama told his security advisers, according to a White House statement. “We dodged a bullet, but just barely.’’

It’s not overstating things to suggest that a presidency still in its first year might be defined for its duration by an unsuccessful act of terror — all the deaths that didn’t occur, the retaliation that wasn’t necessary and the heightened sense of vulnerability that didn’t develop. Answers need to come out of the urgent inquiries as to how intelligence agencies didn’t adequately respond to evidence that an al-Qaida affiliate in the Arabian Peninsula was plotting to attack the United States.

The President laments that the dots weren’t properly connected. That, though, is the business of the intelligence agencies. This administration won’t live up to its mission to make the country safer until those agencies effectively work together. Mr. Obama isn’t the first president to be ill-served by intelligence agencies with competing aims and agendas. He is, though, the one who has to make that obsolete.

The President’s assertions that the nation’s counterterrorism system doesn’t need to be reorganized could prove to be premature. Fixing the way the names of suspected terrorists are added to watch lists and the no-fly list still might mean data bases so extensive as to be not entirely helpful. He’ll also find that a more serious attitude about detecting and preventing terrorism plots will test his vow to not let national security measures impede civil liberties.

No one, though, should doubt that the President is both chastened and determined to confront a nemesis he perhaps didn’t entirely appreciate. There’s something oddly reassuring, in fact, about hearing him say what’s he been hesitant to so solemnly declare, “We are at war, we are at war against al-Qaida. We will do whatever it takes to defeat them.”